Meta Question

Why do questions sometimes get pushed to editing and sometimes not?

I have two questions that needs editing because there’s misspelling. I flagged them myself since I want perfect questions on my page. None of them got pushed to editing. However, one of my questions did pushed to editing 4 times in a row because of each little error. Why the discrimination? I don’t understand it.

Mods receive flags via their email inboxes. Mixed in with the flags are notifications about all kinds of other activity having to do with spam, most of it auto-generated. Just to give you an idea of the volume of email, I opened my mod email account in August, I think, and it now has over 19,000 messages in it. It’s very easy for a flag to get buried in all of that noise and go unnoticed, especially if it comes through at a time when a mod isn’t around for awhile.

It wasn’t this way a few years back. The spam traffic has become quite heavy. There are times when two solid pages of my mod gmail are just records of action against spam accounts. If a mod is just checking in quickly to see if there’s anything that needs urgent attention, they may not dig deep enough into the emails to see a particular flag. We all wish it weren’t that way. Short of overhauling the whole system (and realistically, that ain’t gonna happen), if you feel that a flag may have been missed you can always send a PM to a mod. That will show up both on their mod email and in their “Messages for You” box.

Once a Q is in the editing process, it can get bounced back and forth a few times between the mods and the user. That can be a frustrating experience on both ends, believe me.

@rojo Most mod decisions are made independently by whoever happens to be around at the time, because most cases are pretty clear-cut. If there is any doubt, we do discuss it amongst the team and try to come to a consensus, or at least a majority opinion. I guess I’d be the final arbiter, but it very rarely comes to that.